Description

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American missionary encounters in the Middle East set foundations for later U.S.-Middle Eastern relations. Missionaries presented examples of American culture to Middle Eastern peoples, just as they interpreted the Middle East for Americans back home. These engagements prompt larger questions about the consequences of American Christian cultural projection into the wider world. This volume focuses on regions that were once part of the Ottoman Empire in western Asia, the Balkans, and North Africa. Contributors explain the distinctly American dimensions of these missionary encounters, the cultural influences they exerted on the region, and their consequences for local nationalism, print culture, education, and more. This is an excellent resource for specialists in history, Middle Eastern studies, American studies, religious studies, missiology, and anyone interested more broadly in American engagement in the Middle East.

About Author

Mehmet Ali Dogan is an alumnus of Bilkent University in Ankara and received his PhD from the University of Utah. He teaches at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences of Istanbul Technical University. He is currently preparing an annotated bibliography of American missionary activities in the Ottoman Empire. This is his first book. Heather J. Sharkey is an associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age